Monday, February 6, 2012

Build Day 31: Making it better

We were off yesterday for the super bowl and the second rookie build day in Houston. We had a smaller turnout but we got to provide a lot of information and to demo our robot.

Today we started on the long list of improvements we made during Saturday's testing. We have to get the shooter mechanically consistent before we can expect the controls team to make accurate shots. We're making small changes such as making sure the ball aligns properly to the shooter wheels and changing the spacing of the shooter wheels. We also rebuilt the shooter CIM-sim gearbox to make sure there are no metal shaving on the gears and to fix the airflow issue with the Fisher Price motors.

We also are working on integrating all of the sensors that are on this robot. There are sensors for every motor and as of right now non of the programs have been tested yet. Some of them are simple and should work right away other are far harder and will require a huge amount of testing and tweaking.

We also are cleaning up some of the electrical system. We're making custom PWM cables for each Jaguar so there isn't to much excess wire that we have to hide. We're doing the same with all the sensor wires.

- Allen Gregory

"Mistakes are the best way to learn. Don’t be afraid to make them. Try not to repeat the same ones too often." - Leo Babauta